Film/TV

Returning to Everett’s farm, not to find the treasure they sought, but to retrieve his wedding ring, they are met by the bespectacled lawman who has dogged their trail all along. He has prepared nooses, graves—and even a haunting troupe of gravedigging singers.

“But we’s been pardoned! They announced it on the radio!” the three protest. The policeman replies with haunting simplicity: “We don’t have a radio.”

Faced with the impending reality of death, Everett puts up an earnest prayer for salvation. There are no atheists in foxholes.

And, like clockwork, the deus ex-es the machina. Floodwaters come streaming down that engulf both the just and the unjust in a torrent of household furniture and Dapper Dan pomade. Safely afloat a coffin Moby-Dick style, Delmar attempts to point out to Everett that his prayer worked.

But on the other side of peril, Everett is back to rationalizing. The valley was, of course, already scheduled to be flooded by local bureaucrats. It is not God, but modern technology that has saved them. Everett smugly concludes, “Yessir, we’re gonna have us a veritable age of reason.” But then something floats by which leaves both protagonist and viewer with the furrowed brow of recall.

The other cow just dropped. Memory has spoken. It has all come to pass, just as the old prophet Tiresias predicted.

The Coens’ comic masterpiece fits comfortably into the “Christ-haunted American South” of Flannery O’Connor. It muses, alongside Hamlet, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy!”

But more than set dressing, it’s the moral architecture of the Western that gives Star Wars its discernable spine. The best Westerns understand that wide open spaces don’t make life simpler. On the frontier, there’s nowhere to hide who you really are. A man’s character isn’t protected by institutions or excuses. Instead, it’s revealed whenever trouble rides into town. A rancher who refuses to bend to corruption, a gunman who finally hangs up his weapon, a sheriff who stands his ground when the rest of the town scatters—these traits define them more than the outcome of any gunfight or duel ever could.

Likewise, Star Wars is filled with moral clarity born from the same crucible. Han Solo stands right where the Western and the space opera overlap. He begins the classic wandering gun-hand, cut from the same cloth as L’Amour’s Lance Kilkenny or Hondo Lane, self-reliant, suspicious, interested only in profit. He’ll draw his blaster in a heartbeat. He shoots first. He’s the man who insists he “ain’t in this for your revolution.” But like so many of L’Amour’s protagonists, Han is not morally static. Western heroes often start self-serving but become protectors when faced with injustice that threatens people they’ve come to care about. Han’s arc sees him become something even more recognizably Western: a good man forged in a bad land.

You see, movies have always relied to some degree on “awe,” and the further filmmakers leaned into awing their audience, the more successful they became. This is why, throughout film history, short films gave way to features, which gave way to epics, which gave way to blockbusters, which gave way to the mega-blockbusters. But this “awe effect” comes with a big price tag. We have to see Spider-Man swing, Superman fly, and Batman punch people throughout the film or we feel unsatisfied. And this costs a lot of money to do over and over again.

But this isn’t true of horror and faith-based films, where the biggest awe factor is the thing we don’t see. In faith-based films, that’s God. You can have a faith-based film that deals simply with ordinary people doing normal things, but as they get closer to God or God acts dramatically in their lives, fans of the genre feel the same elation as they do when seeing the Millennium Falcon shoot into hyperspace. Likewise, in horror films, we are often there to see the monster. But we also expect—and want—to not see the monster most of the time, because a lot of the entertainment is in the fear of anticipation that the monster’s hiddenness brings. So again, it’s much cheaper to make a monster in a horror film because we don’t expect to see it throughout most of the movie.

The other thing that gives faith-based films and horror films an advantage is that they resist the erosion of monoculture, as both genres lean heavily on religious narratives and religious communities that involve people meeting every week and listening to the same stories together. Haidt notes this in The Anxious Generation as well. Religious services bind people together under a shared system of values and experiences. This creates a common culture of tastes and values that movies can then appeal to. As secular culture continues to subdivide into smaller and smaller subcultures, religious communities will stand out as the biggest and least divided of the subcultures, making it easier for studios to identify and reach out to.